She saved his life with a single shot and an explosion of long-dead brain matter. In return he teaches her about time and its manipulation. He shows her how to move and how to breathe--which, at it turns out, are both more complicated than we're born knowing. He shows her how to be a knife that cuts through the world without ever using a gun.
He shows her how to breathe and he breathes into her, breathes from her, that first night with everything soaked in milky corpse-light and the shuffling of the dead outside the walls. Apart and isolated, they could bathe in death, but when he closes his mouth over hers they set the fucking world on fire.
They can't touch us, she whispers, and he almost believes her. The world is dead but she has her gun and he has his knife and together they're a gorgeous fucking danse macabre. If she were silent it would hurt too much, it would summon up a ghost, so he pulls sounds from her mouth with his hands and his lips and his tongue. He makes her sing and scream and then, because he can't let her be quiet, because it would hurt so fucking much, he traces the line of the scar on her face with the tip of his tongue until he can see it blind.
This is not a true story. But if it were true it could wake the dead.
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She saved his life with a single shot and an explosion of long-dead brain matter. In return he teaches her about time and its manipulation. He shows her how to move and how to breathe--which, at it turns out, are both more complicated than we're born knowing. He shows her how to be a knife that cuts through the world without ever using a gun.
He shows her how to breathe and he breathes into her, breathes from her, that first night with everything soaked in milky corpse-light and the shuffling of the dead outside the walls. Apart and isolated, they could bathe in death, but when he closes his mouth over hers they set the fucking world on fire.
They can't touch us, she whispers, and he almost believes her. The world is dead but she has her gun and he has his knife and together they're a gorgeous fucking danse macabre. If she were silent it would hurt too much, it would summon up a ghost, so he pulls sounds from her mouth with his hands and his lips and his tongue. He makes her sing and scream and then, because he can't let her be quiet, because it would hurt so fucking much, he traces the line of the scar on her face with the tip of his tongue until he can see it blind.
This is not a true story. But if it were true it could wake the dead.